Saturday, 27 December 2014

Use by Dates

My favourite part of supermarket shopping is getting a bargain on an item I was going to buy anyway. If I can knock 50%, or even 25%, off the meat bill I feel like I've won something.

There's a bit of skill involved in this though. Not just seeing and grabbing the items on special, but also co-ordinating the storage later so that all items are consumed or frozen by their best-before or use-by dates.

I did pretty well yesterday - three meat bargains, at a fraction of their original cost. Two of these were chicken which not only started off on special, but were then further discounted for quick consumption. Yeah baby - that's the good stuff.

The chicken had to be cooked up by the end of today, and the other meat special - scotch fillet steak - has to be consumed by the end of tomorrow.

All was going well. I planned out cooking up the first packet of chicken for lunch yesterday, the first half of steak for tea, the next packet of chicken for tea tonight, and the last steak tomorrow. There would be some pieces of cold chicken surviving the original cook which could be consumed at my leisure for snacking.

But yesterday was very hot, and I didn't feel like cooking my lunch at all. Not. At. All.

Not to worry, I just pushed back the cooking of the first packet of chicken until lunch today. And then the second for tea. I went ahead with the steak on schedule because hunger and cravings won out over laziness and hotness. That's the correct use of the word hotness, right?

Then at lunch today, again I couldn't be bothered. I didn't actually wake up until almost ten o'clock because someone has decided their snoring device is for work-nights only, and apparently doesn't know the way to the couch.

My tiredness finally overwhelmed my noise control issues at two-thirty this morning so it took longer than usual to get the required amount of sleep. You'd think with all that extra time awake at night I would've found something useful to do, but I was surprisingly unproductive lying in bed with every muscle tensed with annoyance.

To be fair, I could've cooked up ALL the chicken tonight and still met my deadlines, but I vastly preferred freshly cooked chicken over cold cooked chicken any day.

So the wooshing sound tonight as I lie trying to sleep won't be from my beloved's unholy tongue positioning, but instead from the use-by date on my chicken rushing by.

Found Near Water

Skeletal

Breathe and Release

About Me

Katherine Hayton is a middle-aged woman who works in insurance, doesn't have children or pets, can't drive, has lived in Christchurch her entire life, and currently resides a two-minute walk from where she was born.

For some reason, she's developed a rich fantasy life.

Buy one of her books, and she'll be able to retire in luxury. Or in comfort. Or in just-scraping-by-but-at-least-I'm-not-in-the-office-24-7-ness.